Day One | by Pat

As Charlie is well aware, introductory press conference quotes can stick with you for a long time. Here are some of the more memorable things that Brian Kelly said during his first official meet and greet with the press last Friday.

• There is a football coach and then there's the football coach at Notre Dame, because nobody, nobody does it like Notre Dame.

• Yes, we've got challenges, just like anybody else. But we'll go to work on it right away, and we'll do that by continuing to recruit what I call the RKGs, the right kind of guys, those that match the mission of this University. We'll continue to look towards player development as being the key and the cornerstone of our success.

• So what I can tell you today is that our football players will continue to represent the model of Notre Dame. I want tough gentlemen. I want football players that are mentally and physically tough that will play for four quarters, and I want gentlemen off the field that we all can be proud of. And we will do that here at Notre Dame.

• If you're not passionate about what you do and how you do it, you probably won't connect with me. So I'm looking for that passion, and it's got to resonate with me in the recruiting process.

• You do not come to the University of Notre Dame because you want to be average. You want to be the best of the best. And that's why I'm here. It inspires me to be around young men like I had in front of me today.

• Well, first and foremost, restoring it to the traditions that we all know about and the history, and those aren't 8 and 4 years; those are National Championship years. So any time you're talking about restoring a program and the challenges, it's not about winning the Conference Championship; it's about winning championships and being in the BCS and being nationally prominent. And that's a challenge. We've got to get to work on that.

• Attention to detail is absolutely crucial in this process of winning, and so when I talk about working on winning, I mean you do that from the first day you step on this campus if you want to win. You don't win on Saturdays with Xs and Os. You win on Saturdays because you've been working on it all week, and so it's that attention to detail. It's morale, it's camaraderie, it's one voice.

• Well, again, I think it's important to point out that you win and lose football games as a whole. So offense, defense and special teams has been what I'm an expert at. And when I talk about expert at it, I mean I don't just rely on one side of the ball. As a head football coach, you are responsible for all those areas, and as you can tell probably from my experience in Division II, we had when I started two full time coaches. So you couldn't just be the offensive coordinator; you couldn't just be the defensive coordinator; you had to be involved in all those areas. I will be intimately involved with what we do defensively as the head football coach.

• And what I would tell a recruit right now is that the opportunity at Notre Dame is unique from anyone that you'd ever have in your life. And so I think I would refer to all of my conversations being in the present and in the future and where this program is going to go. And you can be part of that. You can be part of restoring the great tradition and history of Notre Dame, and I'm going to help you get there. I'm going to develop you as a young man so you get that opportunity to be part of it. Are you in?

• Well, actually I walked into the head football coach's office, and I was ready to sit down at the reception area because I thought that was the office. It was beautiful. And they said, no, Coach, it's in here to the left.

• These young men want to win, and that's why I'm here at Notre Dame. I want to be around men that are committed, and we can't trade anybody. There's no waiver wire. We're going to develop our players, and they're going to play their very best for us. That to me has always been the most important principle. Let's go; don't tell me what you don't have; I don't want to know about it. Tell me what you can do to help us win. And that's the way we'll hit this thing running.

• Yeah, we'd want to be aggressive offensively. We'll have to evaluate. Again, adapting to the personnel is first for me, and we'll move from there. But we won't change the blueprint. It's still going to be a high tempo, aggressive offense that we run. But I'm going to have to get a better feel on the personnel before I can say, here's where we're going to go. But it's going to be aggressive on offense.

• It's not written down in the sense that if you do this, you get that. But if you don't do that, you'll never get your players to go to areas that they can't go without you. In other words, you can move them to a level that they can't get to by themselves. That's player development. That's at the core of what I mean, to get people to do things that they normally wouldn't do on their own. To me that's player development.
  

• You know, I want guys that can build relationships. I think it's still about people. Whether you're in Texas or California or you're in West Virginia, recruiting is relationship driven. It's hard work. It's being persistent. It's is also selling your program and what you have and the uniqueness of it. That doesn't concern me at all.